It wasn’t supposed to be this way — to spend years preparing for a fairytale honeymoon in a five-star resort on an exotic tropical island only to be served by a chef who learned his trade living down the road from my basement flat in Peckham.

The restaurant in question is Dasheene — named after the plant used to make callaloo — and the South Londoner in question is Orlando Satchell, a man with an evangelical zeal to put Caribbean cuisine on the map.

Dasheene is couched in the sedate setting of the Ladera hotel on the island of St Lucia, where birds come and perch on the tables and the only sound late at night are the frogs burping words of love.

It was a million miles from Peckham — well, perhaps not that far, and if you’ve ever walked down Rye Lane on a Saturday, you’ll know what I mean — but it was sufficiently incongruous that when we and Orlando met, we felt like kindred spirits exploring the world. And almost immediately, the chef’s life story came tumbling out.

Born in Birmingham to parents from Barbados and Jamaica he completed a City & Guilds, then began his career as a teenage cook in the private staff restaurant at Hamleys (yes, the toy shop). After learning to say, “Naah what I mean?,” and losing the Birmingham twang, posts followed in Beverly Hills, at a private St John’s Wood hospital, the Caribbean Palm Cafe in Miami, a stint in Moscow (“I wanted a restaurant with sand on the floor to contrast with the snow outside”) the Berners Hotel before he finally set up his own Caribbean catering business.

But how did he end up wowing tourists in St Lucia with his ‘native’ cooking?

“It was my accountant who suggested it,” he explains with a smile, clearly loving the tale. After spending two years in Singapore establishing a Caribbean restaurant, Orlando headed to St Lucia.

“This need to be more than a location,” he said on a visit to Ladera and set about creating a restaurant serving food as good as the view.

Tourism is St Lucia’s primary source of income. Yet the position of Caribbean cuisine in this lucrative field is precarious. Local restaurants dish up rudimentary-looking dishes doused in delicious sauces outside of the resorts, while rich Westerners protected within hotel enclaves are often served a terrifying fusion of locally-caught fish, tasteless air-dropped vegetables, rubbery frozen bivalves and incongruous French sauces.

Orlando has now been at Ladera 12 years and proven Caribbean cuisine is a whole lot more than meat, beans and rice. He’s worked with the farmers to get the ingredients he wants, when he wants and his dishes are simple but beautifully balanced.

Passionate about showing off Caribbean cooking Orlando wants to bring this cuisine to the world. And while Ladera are fantastically lucky to have him — and the managers know it — here’s hoping one day he settles back in South London and gives the locals a taste of what they deserve.

For more on Orlando’s mission, check out his website sharethelovechef.com.